


heart, what a rare bird you are

by limehoneytea



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish deserves the world, Adam Parrish-centric, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon compliant until the last scene, Character Study, First Kiss, Fluff, Holding Hands, I spent more than that I would like to admit coming up with soulmarks for the characters, M/M, Minor Past Adam Parrish/Blue Sargent, Mutual Pining, Soft Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23177395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limehoneytea/pseuds/limehoneytea
Summary: Adam Parrish doesn’t cherish, he’s never truly learned to. He protects, he defends, he safeguards, all of that he knows. But, he’s never learned to cherish, never learned to protect something because he loves it, and not because if he doesn’t protect it, it will be taken away from him.But still, if he were to pick one thing to cherish, it would be this: the inky black raven and the deep green vines and the stupidly detailed flowers inked across his chest and down to his stomach. He cherishes it, cherishes what it means for him, for someone else out there.
Relationships: Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 21
Kudos: 271





	heart, what a rare bird you are

**Author's Note:**

> -it's project onto adam parrish and pretend everything's fine szn!  
> \- anyway, nyc schools are closed and so I wrote a soulmate au for pynch because I miss them a lot!! I've read a lot for this fandom but I haven't written anything for them until now so I hope you enjoy!  
> \- title credit: Rumi (poet)

The mark curls around his torso, a large, but delicate thing. A raven, entangled in vines and flowers, looks almost content cocooned in the sprawling green flecked with soft blues on his chest, the head right above his heart. 

Among closer inspection, the blue petals only come in two distinct shades, a deep warm shade perfectly matching Adam’s eyes on the select days the sun filters through his window just right and he can get a good look at them in the cracked mirror propped up on his wall. The other blue holds an icier sort of tone. It is not the sort that is cold, calculating, always deadly and piercing, but the sort that trickles down to liquid on warm summer days, providing solace when the sun gets to be too much. 

(Perhaps, that is, in its own way, deadly too.)

The petals fold around each other, encasing the blues into themselves until the tightly wound petals seem as if they’re one from a distance. But, closer up, the distinctions are visible among them: the gold flecks on the lighter blues, the faint green ring around the tip of some of the darker ones. 

Adam Parrish doesn’t cherish, he’s never truly learned to. He protects, he defends, he safeguards, all of that he knows. But, he’s never learned to cherish, never learned to protect something because he loves it, and not because if he doesn’t protect it, it will be taken away from him. 

But still, if he were to pick one thing to cherish, it would be this: the inky black raven and the deep green vines and the stupidly detailed flowers inked across his chest and down to his stomach. He cherishes it, cherishes what it means for him, for someone else out there. 

It is impossible to lose a soulmark, Adam knows. He’s spent hours as a child hunched over the rickety wooden tables of Henrietta’s only library consuming story after story, fiction, non-fiction, everything he could get his hands on, about soulmates. 

He knows of people who have lost limbs carrying their soulmarks, only to find the same mark fading back into existence later on some other part of their body. He’s learned about burn victims whose burns healed only where their soulmark stood, just enough so the mark was visible once more. He’s read about prisoners of war, their marks carved out of their skin, or stab wounds placed strategically over soulmarks, and he’s read about how the marks have still persevered, still made a home on the skin of the person they belong to. Scars, tattoo inks, burns: none ever manage to stick on soulmarks.

No one can take his soulmark away, no matter how much they try. No matter what he goes through, it will always stick with him, always by his side, and though the same thought about any other part of his life makes bile climb up his throat, this is comforting. This is his, and his alone, and Adam Parrish cherishes it. 

He traces over the curling vines when another bruise throbs on his cheeks, places his hand over his heart, right where the raven’s head is inked, when his heartbeat stutters in the face of yet another disdainful glance. He seeks solace in the soft blue flowers when his father’s words cut too deep, the emotion of unshed tears (tears are for babies, of course) coming through in his gentle touches. 

The thought that there is someone out there in the world made for  _ Adam _ is a warm weight on his chest. Someone made to fit him exactly, to love him, to be there for him, with all his faults and shortcomings. He knows soulmate stories are not always great feats of love, that some soulmates never even meet each other and though everyone has a soulmate, it is perfectly acceptable for couples to stay together, to love each other and not be soulmates. 

(Like his parents, he thinks, but there isn’t much love between them.)

Adam knows that a future like that is completely plausible for him, but that thought doesn’t beat the idea of the universe cutting someone else from the same cloth he’s cut from; two different snapshots of the same scene, completely whole apart, but just a little bit better when put together. 

He will meet his soulmate, Adam decides, and there isn’t much that can’t be done once Adam Parrish sets his mind to it. 

  
  
  


He meets Ronan Lynch in one of the many dusty History classrooms in Aglionby, his head leaning lazily against the wall. His tie is loosened and the top few buttons of his shirt are unbuttoned. He is a picture of careless grace, an image straight from the sculptures of the old masters, an itching urge to move delicately carved into every stationary muscle. Adam hates him for it.

He looks bored out of his mind, and Adam immediately lumps him with one of  _ those _ boys, attending the school Adam worked so hard for only on the merits of their parents’ money and slacking off because who needs an education when you could live out your entire life off of daddy’s money alone? 

Lynch’s eyes meet Adam’s, and there is something so familiar about them that Adam has to remind himself to breathe. Lynch glares, all rough edges and biting, and Adam looks away at the intensity of the gaze and trains his eyes onto the teacher. The man’s monotone voice  _ is _ dreadfully boring, he concedes, maybe Lynch has a point.

  
  
  


He meets Richard Campbell Gansey III later that year, so focused on the smoking innards of his atrociously bright car that he doesn’t notice Adam approaching. Adam offers to help, because though Aglionby boys are menaces, he’s heard of the so-called King of Aglionby, and he figures an alliance could be helpful if he wants to survive the school.

Turns out, helping Gansey gives Adam more than he bargained for. He gets Ronan Lynch’s grudging approval and the companionship of smudgy Noah Czerny, the boy who seems to have a knack for disappearing. He gets overwhelming amounts of friendship and loyalty out of these stuffy boys he had never before considered associating with and he’s glad he decided to lend a helping hand to Richard Gansey III that one fateful day. He doesn’t know what he would do without those boys.

  
  
  


He meets Blue Sargent on a day at Nino’s with his friends (friends,  _ friendship _ , Adam has those now). He looks at her mismatched clothing and messy hair and thinks,  _ maybe _ . Her name is Blue, after all, blue like the flowers dotting his torso, blue like the petals nestled within each other.  _ Maybe _ , he thinks, as he spends more money than he can spare on flowers, the closest shade of blue to his mark he could find. For her, for Blue, for  _ blue _ . 

(Ronan Lynch gains a pet raven along the way and Adam tries very hard not to think about it).

Ronan Lynch punches Adam’s father, to protect him and Adam would hate it, normally, but there is something about this, about Ronan’s arms launching through the air. He knows the humiliation will creep up on him soon, knows that he will hate himself for accepting help, accepting pity, but for now, there is only this: when Ronan’s arm is outstretched and his shirt shifts just a bit, there is a distantly familiar vine curling around the pointed bone. 

Adam sacrifices himself to a forest, because that is a thing that is plausible now, and Adam Parrish, if nothing else, is very good at adapting. He says,  _ I will be your hands, I will be your eyes _ , and later, when Blue Sargent holds his hand and shows him her mark, he doesn’t feel as terrible as he knows he should.

Her mark is small, resting gently on her bicep, the dimensions about the same as that of a dollar bill. It depicts a forest on one half, the trees glowing gently, and a mirror on the other half, the image the same as the forest but stronger, the inked lines darker. There are dozens of tiny ravens in the air, flying, _ free _ , creating the eery shape of a crown over the two sides.  _ The Raven King _ , Adam thinks distantly, the thought almost out of reach,  _ oh _ . “Do you know who it is?” he asks, forcing himself to eradicate the waver in his voice. 

She smiles somewhat sadly, tilting her head. “I have an idea,” she hums, shrugging. “You?”

Adam breathes in, then out, then in again. He plucks his shirt off, springing the raven free. Blue pauses, stares, her eyes trailing over the wide expanse the mark takes over. “I have an idea,” he echoes, exhaling slowly. 

They’re just friends again, and Adam likes it better than whatever they were doing before.

  
  
  


Ronan Lynch is an enigma, a riddle Adam is desperate to solve. He stares and he notices and he leaves gifts but he never expresses. It’s always a hint here, a look there, but it’s never anything concrete, anything real. Adam’s not even sure they’re soulmates, nothing can be confirmed from the barest hints of vines he can catch sometimes, but there is something between them, Adam can feel it. Something simmering in the space between their bodies, in the crackle of electricity in the air. 

It is in the heat of summer when something happens, when the electricity reaches a peak and crackles to a simmer. 

“It’s so fucking hot in here, Parrish,” Ronan comments as he pushes open Adam’s door, sweat dripping down his neck. “How are you alive?”

Adam has to actively divert his focus from the droplet of sweat making its way steadily down the column of Ronan’s neck as he mutters, “No one asked you to be here,” in the sort of tone that truly says,  _ I want you to be here _ .

Ronan ignores him with a roll of his eyes and collapses bonelessly onto the floor, head resting against the palm of his hand, an elbow propped up on the floor. “You know, you could come up here,” Adam offers, gesturing to the empty space amidst all his textbooks and study material. 

There is a strange sort of look on Ronan’s eyes, somehow familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. “Nah,” he answers after a moment of silence, “Hot air rises, cold air sinks, remember?” He rolls his eyes and the gesture fits on his face like the expression was made specifically for him. “Never say I don’t pay attention in class again.”

“Is that the last time you paid attention?” Adam asks, the banter easy with Ronan, comfortable. “Sixth grade?”

Ronan’s eyes drift skyward as if he’s asking the heavens for patience and grunts out a good-natured (for Ronan, anyway), “Fuck you, Parrish.” He shoves his earbuds in his ears and lays down fully, bracing his hand under the back of his neck. This is routine for them and Adam smiles faintly at the familiarity of it all, before returning to the countless textbooks splayed out in front of him. 

There are a few minutes of comfortable silence before an interruption arises. Ronan grunts, spreading his hands out and starfishing on the moist wooden floor. “It’s so fucking hot,” he groans, abruptly sitting up. “Parrish,” he says, and when Adam looks up, Ronan is staring right at him. The few droplets of sweat dripping down his neck from earlier seem to have multiplied and Adam will deny to his last day that he has trouble breathing at the sight of it, but he does. 

“Yes, Ronan?” he responds, carefully constructed exasperation masking the somewhat breathless quality his voice has taken. 

“Shield your virgin eyes, I’m chucking my shirt off,” Ronan warns, his cheeks heating up just slightly. Adam’s sure he’s redder than Ronan is, even though Ronan’s Irish and getting really red is practically a defining quality for them. Adam nods, slowly, carefully so, making strides to an effort to good-naturedly scoff at the word  _ virgin _ but failing, the sound trapped in his throat.

Despite his warning, Ronan is hesitant about it, fingers creeping to the hem of his shirt and then lingering there. Adam thinks he knows why: showing people your soulmark, which is what he assumes is under the shirt, is intimate, private. Ronan’s never been one to care for the societal outlook on his actions but for some reason, on this particular one, he falters. Adam is looking at him, scanning his face, and Ronan looks about ready to back out, except, now that he’s declared it, he can’t back out on principle. That’s not like him either.

He takes a steadying breath, so small that if Adam hadn’t known him as well as he does, he wouldn’t have noticed. His fingers curl around the bottom of his shirt and he pulls up, and  _ oh _ .

When Adam told Blue he had an idea who his soulmate was, it felt like hope, childish desire. It didn’t feel real, as much as Adam wanted it to be, but now that Ronan’s in front of him, the raven displayed, flowers and vines and all, Adam feels…  _ alive _ . 

“Parrish,” Ronan calls, puffing out his chest(it looks way too good for it to belong to a boy who spends the majority of his day doing no physical activity whatsoever but Adam appreciates it nonetheless), and waving a hand over Adam’s stilled face. “If you’re that scandalized, I’ll put the shirt back on,” he mutters, somewhat sadly. Adam shakes his head, slowly, slowly, and reaches out, tentative fingertips meeting Ronan’s.

Ronan pauses, stilling in his movements. Adam’s reminded of his first impression of it, like a statue carved from marble with delicate fingers, looking as if motion is etched into every muscle in his body. “Parrish,” he says, half confused, the other half afraid. Adam realizes his eyes are widened, in shock or in fear, he doesn’t know, but he pushes his fingers forward and curls them around Ronan’s fingers. “Parrish, what’s wrong?” he asks, softly, softer than what is probably in character for Ronan Lynch.

Adam shifts closer, right to the edge of the bed. His free hand drifts to the bottom of his shirt, fingers curling around the hem. “Parrish, what—” Ronan tries but comes to a screeching halt when the pale skin of Adam’s stomach is exposed. The soft blue flowers nestled among the spindling green vines, the arched feet of the raven. Ronan’s hand quivers slightly from where it’s pressed against Adam’s fingers. 

“What the fuck,” he mutters softly, reaching out with his free hand, stopping right before he touches skin. He looks up at Adam hesitantly and suddenly this moment feels a lot more intimate than it did seconds ago. Adam nods, disconnecting his hand with Ronan’s to peel the whole shirt off, and then they’re both sitting in Adam’s ridiculously warm apartment half naked. Adam can feel himself turn a shade redder.

Ronan tentatively touches a finger to the foot of the raven, leaving electricity in his trail on Adam’s skin. He traces upwards and when Adam looks to his face, he can see Ronan’s eyes shut. He’s tracing the raven from memory, like he can see it with his eyes closed and maybe he can. He traces the swoop of Adam’s collarbone where a vine curls around a small flower, and down his side, where a few blue flower petals peek out from beneath the raven’s wing. 

“It’s the color of our eyes, have you noticed?” Adam asks when Ronan's hand drifts back up to the head of the raven, palm down, right over his heart. He hadn’t noticed until just then, from when Ronan’s eyes were closed and he could recall a vivid memory of what they looked like when open. Icy, but never too cold to turn to liquid in the face of the sun. Solace. 

Ronan’s eyes flutter open as his palm presses harder into the skin above Adam’s heart. He looks afraid, like Adam is going to lash out, push him off, never want to see his face again. But Adam only reaches out his hand and tilts his chin up with gentle fingers. “Parrish,” Ronan whispers, as if it's the only word he knows. Adam reaches his other hand to trail over Ronan’s shoulder, gingerly, gently until he believes Adam cares for him too. 

There have been cases of platonic soulmates, of soulmates who feel nothing for each other than what comes with friendship, but whose souls are intertwined anyway. It’s just as common as romantic soulmates, if not more, but, something about the way Ronan’s eyes zero in on Adam’s lips and the way Adam’s attention is captured by the gentle flutter of Ronan’s eyelashes, say that platonic soulmates is not what they are. 

“Adam,” Ronan says, tearing his eyes away from Adam’s lips to meet his eyes. Adam blinks, startled. It’s never  _ Adam _ , always  _ Parrish _ . Until it’s not. Ronan still looks afraid, despite the soothing hand combing over his shoulder. There’s a question in his eyes, a hesitation carved into the slight crinkle of his forehead. 

Adam smiles, a real, stretched out smile that takes over the majority of his face. He’s still tired, his shoulders aching, purple bags hanging under his eyes, but he’s smiling, wide and patient and  _ happy _ . He slides down to join Ronan onto the floor, the two shifting in unison to make room. His hand is still cradling Ronan’s face as he leans in, stopping just before their lips touch. “Hi,” he says through a smile, as if it was just an ordinary greeting. 

“You gonna kiss me, or what?” Ronan asks through grit teeth and Adam is more than happy to oblige.

Adam Parrish doesn’t cherish, he’s never truly learned to. He protects, he defends, he safeguards, all of that he knows. But, he’s never learned to cherish, never learned to protect something because he loves it, and not because if he doesn’t protect it, it will be taken away from him. 

But still, if he were to pick one thing to cherish, it would be this: The softness of Ronan Lynch’s lips against his, the way his muscles relax under every touch of Adam’s hand. He cherishes it, cherishes the feeling of Ronan mumbling complaints about the heat into his skin, cherishes getting to muffle his laughter into somebody else’s lips. 

And underneath their matched ravens, their hearts carry the same beat. 

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking of a bluesey spinoff for this and/or this but in Ronan's pov? Thoughts? Let me know what you thought about this too! Comments keep me going!


End file.
